"1) Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No. 2) Do we care
what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.
3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don't think so,
but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really
hard to earn and keep your trust."

Newell's post was provoked by the fact that VAC was checking for
the presence of cheats, many of which involve DRM protocols to
prevent cheaters from cheating the cheat creators.

VAC was then doing a further check in the user's DNS cache to
see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. "Less than a tenth
of one percent of clients triggered the second check," according to
Newell, and "570 cheaters are being banned as a result".

The test is no longer active as the cheat providers have found a
workaround which manipulates the DNS cache of their customers'
machines.

Newell explained that details of the system were usually kept
under wraps to prevent cheat creators from finding ways to work
around the security measures but that trust was vital to VAC's
ongoing success. To that end he added:

"There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is
to attack people's trust in the system. If 'Valve is evil -- look
they are tracking all of the websites you visit' is an idea that
gets traction, then that is to the benefit of cheaters and cheat
creators.

"VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it
is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to
attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social
engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than
continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more
Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light."